Why Spike Jonze's Her will both infuriate and entertain your inner geek

Warning: This article contains mild spoilers that some readers may prefer to avoid.

The last few decades have seen such gigantic leaps in the speed and power of technology that future gazing has become a hugely exciting thing to do. No medium is guilty of doing it more than cinema.

Free from the constraints of reality, writers and directors are able to portray their own vision of what they think the future might hold.

More often than not, the concept of artificial intelligence is key to all this guesswork. Films like Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner have all portrayed the idea of AI as something of a threat.

Latest to tackle the artificial intelligence question is Spike Jonze's Her. The film follows the life of down and out writer Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and his relationship with a first generation artificial intelligence played by Scarlett Johansson.

Key to the believability of Her is the world in which it is set. Appearing like a hyper-real Apple commercial, complete with pastel color scheme and acoustic guitar soundtrack, it feels like a more perfect version of our own current reality.

Other nods to current generation technology help to make the world of Her more believable. Samantha (the name Twombly gives to the AI) is communicated with not only in using Siri-style spoken word, but via a device that resembles a smartphone.

So convincing in fact is the execution of the world of Her, that Joaquin Phoenix's emotional dilemma becomes just that bit more believable.

There was however one small aspect of Her's believability that not only detracted from the viewing experience as a whole, but acted as a reminder to our own problems with technology now.

Recent years have seen an obsession with the idea of privacy and a backlash against any major changes made to the status quo of consumer electronics.

Samantha's unadulterated access to the inner-workings of Twombly's digital life is something that contributes largely to the downfall of their relationship, but is also difficult to believe given how coveted our personal information is right now.

We found ourselves constantly thinking, 'Would you trust an artificial intelligence with your email inbox?'

Perhaps more interesting is how Twombly shares the world around him with Samantha. Using a device that resembles a smartphone, Samantha can stare out at the world through the camera on the back, accompanying Twombly while he is out and about.

Given the AI's ability to communicate with others, we struggle to see a situation where an AI would be able to follow your every move in such detail.

All this boils down to an obsession with security in technology, one which in many ways is holding us back from advancement, but in others is crucial to managing the rate and direction at which consumer electronics evolve.

For a large part of the film Samantha has an obsession with the physical human form. As her intelligence grows, she struggles with the fact that she can't come in physical contact with Twombly.

Eventually, her intelligence reaches a point where she finds the physical form entirely unnecessary, going beyond it and into a world in which only the theoretical can exist.

But here is the problem, computers will be always limited by the physical. There is a moment in the movie where Joaquin Phoenix worries that Samantha may have been corrupted.

With the vast complexity of coding and creating artificial intelligence, we can't see a situation where one is even remotely stable for hundreds of years. As such, would you trust one with the innermost workings of your life? Or, as Her examines, your feelings?

What we do like about Her's vision of the future is its acceptance that technology will become completely ubiquitous in the years to come. There is no stigma attached to 'falling in love with an operating system' during the film.

Twombly wonders freely about the world, communicating with Samantha while others do exactly the same. As our own current-generation technology advances, the same rules will likely apply, from Google Glass to smart watches, they will all become normality.

Our biggest debate with Her relates to the film's central message. In creating a world where love with an artificial intelligence is acceptable, Jonze seems to be saying that we are headed for a society where people struggle with feelings beyond the digital world.

Facebook is obviously the driving force behind this argument, with social media in the eyes of Her acting as a precursor to the distance that our increasingly digital lives will have in the future.

For me, however, the internet and our digital social lives extends our contact with others way beyond what it had once been. Over a billion people communicate via Facebook, but very few rely on the social network entirely for all human contact.

Instead, the modern social media is a means for us to keep in touch during periods of time when we can't be physically next to each other. As such, we end up being far more inherently social beings than we once were.

As such, my vision of the future is one not in which people fall in love with artificial intelligence, but instead use it to manage a life that has become so inherently digital that only an intelligent computer system could cope with it.